Resistance at Tule Lake

Directed by Konrad Aderer

Resistance at Tule Lake

Description

A minority group is unjustly persecuted amidst racially-charged scapegoating by politicians. That’s the eerily relevant backdrop for RESISTANCE AT TULE LAKE, Konrad Aderer’s examination of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, which couldn’t come at a more important moment. Aderer, who documented the arrest and detainment of a Palestinian activist in ENEMY ALIEN (2011), focuses on Tule Lake, the notorious camp where Japanese Americans who were labeled “disloyal” were held. Aderer’s emotional, wrenching interviews with the “internees” -— some of whom were deported to Japan because of answers to “loyalty” questionnaires — make clear the consequences of race, wartime hysteria and political expediency. RESISTANCE AT TULE LAKE dispels the myth of a passive Japanese American population in the camps, while also showing the torture and other abuse those resisting their treatment faced. The wartime footage cuts to a contemporary Tule Lake pilgrimage by the descendants of internees, an effort, like the film, to not forget and urge others to defend those today who may suffer the same fate.